Alton Brown's Tip For Using A Ceramic Ginger Grater Without The Cleanup
Alton Brown likes his kitchen tools and gadgets, that is as long as you can multitask with them. The celebrity chef told NPR's All Things Considered, "I have railed against unitaskers for 20 years. I've come around to liking them as strategic gifts for people you don't like." Noted. What are unitaskers? This is actually a term Brown coined to describe kitchen tools that do only one job. One gadget we've seen the "Good Eats" host use on occasion is a ceramic ginger grater. However, before anyone calls this a unitasker, Bon Appétit notes that in addition to ginger, it can also be used to grate "chocolate, garlic, hard cheese," and the winter radish known as daikon.
According to ginger grater manufacturer Kyocera, its graters are made of an "advanced ceramic" and have "rows of long-lasting sharp teeth" that can shred ginger root fast and efficiently, leaving the fibers in the center of the ring. While this little contraption definitely makes the task of pureeing ginger a snap, cleaning it can be a bit of a chore when little bits of fiber get trapped in the teeth. However, Brown has quite the trick to avoid the messy clean-up.
Grab the plastic wrap
In an episode of "Quarantine Quitchen," Alton Brown shares that he uses a common food wrap to make clean-up easier when using his ginger grater. Brown explains that cleaning the teeth of a ceramic ginger grater can be a major pain. He reveals that he uses a piece of plastic wrap and tightly covers his grater to bypass this problem.
But before you cry grater foul, Brown quickly defends this method to the naysayers who might be inclined to claim, "Oh my God, we're going to eat grated plastic!" Brown's response is a quick shake of the head in the negative, signaling this is not going to happen. In the episode, Brown demonstrates the ease of this trick using a piece of peeled ginger and moving it back and forth quickly across the plastic-covered ginger grater. The end result is beautifully grated ginger and no clean-up mess other than what Brown dropped on the floor.
Of course, if you don't have a ceramic ginger grater, Chatelaine says you can still create a mess-free zone using a regular grater. The cooking site shares that if you freeze your peeled ginger, the final product will be "fine shreds that make clean up a snap."